I agree with your sentiment that recommending textbooks to a beginner is a very hard problem and crowd-sourcing may not be the best idea, but I do have questions for the example you provide to prove your assertion and some of the claims you make.
First of all, why would'nt you consider TAOCP a text book on algorithms? Are you trying to discredit discredit the recommender by supplying your own biases? If TAOCP is not a textbook and CLRS is and you provide no arguments against CLRS, why would you come to the conclusion that the contribution is poor? "LessWrong" has it's faults but the disclaimers that it provides is pretty clear and wouldn't you consider it worse if it interjected with it's own opinions?
If we need to listen to an authority "who has surveyed the field", would Knuth be such an authority and his recommendations contained in TAOCP be something you would recommend?
First of all, why would'nt you consider TAOCP a text book on algorithms? Are you trying to discredit discredit the recommender by supplying your own biases? If TAOCP is not a textbook and CLRS is and you provide no arguments against CLRS, why would you come to the conclusion that the contribution is poor? "LessWrong" has it's faults but the disclaimers that it provides is pretty clear and wouldn't you consider it worse if it interjected with it's own opinions?
If we need to listen to an authority "who has surveyed the field", would Knuth be such an authority and his recommendations contained in TAOCP be something you would recommend?